"Lotus Opening" by L. Folk

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Totem Beasts



Happy to say my book Totem Beasts will be published by Big Table in 2017. Here's the eponymous poem, appropriate for this time of year (collage at right is the book cover).
      
           There are no ghosts in this house.
                        No hem of a muslin dress
            draped over a riser.
                        No Emily Dickinson archetype
            figured prominently at the banister.
                        No face in the naked glass.

            The boreal firs, always a regiment,
                        are noble, melancholic as the
            tide bathes the sedge. 
           
            We listen for what the hayfield says.
                                                We wait
            for totem beasts, but no coyote parts these
                        fallow fields.  No moose.  No
            osprey in wake of wind.
                        Quotidian, these crows, those gulls.

            I am filled with pale green air.
                        My sister's child thumps in Utero.
            Clouds snuff the sun, the sacrament, the
                        fiery heart.
           
            Night comes.

            I sit quietly inside myself.
                        My father bows his head here,
            the lines echoing around his eyes.